This week, a New York Times article focused on retailers and their efforts (or lack thereof) to develop mobile sites and apps to enable anytime-anywhere shopping. One statistic that caught my eye in the article: 85 percent of consumers expect to be able to shop using their smartphones and expect that experience to be at least as good as shopping on a computer. Yet, the article reports that: “By mid-2010, according to the Acquity Group, just 12 percent of the top 500 United States online retailers had sites compatible with mobile browsers, while just 7 percent had apps.”

Whether you’re an IT professional, a business decision maker, an employee, a consumer or customer, the topics of mobile productivity and the connected experience matter, regardless of which side of the fence you’re on.

And that’s why I’m excited to announce our latest launch. As headlines continue to tout the proliferation of smartphones and tablets, businesses need to ensure that they can allow secure access for anyone on any device and deliver rich applications (like video and voice) reliably—all while providing seamless integration across all elements.
In addition, when you factor in emerging cloud trends, the ability to deliver voice and video applications over any device becomes even more critical—not to mention complex from a management standpoint.

Today we’re adding more powerful capabilities to the Borderless Network Architecture to help IT administrators ensure success. Three new major solutions for Borderless Networks help make the network architecture work seamlessly, reliably, and securely to address growing trends and expectations.

Remember the days when going to work meant being stuck at your desk, working on a desktop PC? Thankfully, the proliferation of laptops, tablets, and mobile devices, along with a robust network to support connectivity, has enabled all of us to be on the go and working, at the same time.

With new innovations in Borderless Networks, which are being announced today, an organization’s ability to securely connect anyone, anywhere, with their preferred device, while delivering a high quality experience even to the most resource-intensive multimedia applications, has become even stronger.

So how will these new innovations change the workplace even more? Watch this video to find out, and to learn more details on the enhancements.

Luckily, most of us don’t have a boss like that one in the video. And using our smartphones, we can get some work done on the beach! (Ok, maybe).

As for how the new the Borderless Networks innovations will have an impact—they will deliver solutions in three areas: Security, Management, and Multimedia.

Here are the details, and what the new innovations will mean for our partners: Read More »

Cisco Advanced Services has been involved in quite a few Data Center Migration projects over last couple of years. One common theme in most of these migrations was that the projects were never limited to infrastructure migration to shiny new devices. Statements of work almost always included improvements and customization to routing, configuration of QoS across the Data Center Interconnect and the WAN circuits, and to provide some level of instrumentation to validate the traffic flow across multiple different paths. While these requirements seem like a logical extension of any Data Center migration project, fulfilling these requirements was never straightforward.

In most of the customer environments, by looking at the Network topology, we could easily determine safe upper limits of client to server traffic. The real challenge was to determine traffic between the web front-end servers and the application and/or database servers – the east/west traffic. Some wild assumptions were made in some cases since the data was either not available or was inadequate. This lack of network traffic profiling made QoS provisioning very difficult on WAN circuits and almost impossible on the Inter Data Center links.

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